Myra Greene

Underpinnings

Myra Greene will share the thoughts, processes and precedents that have influenced her artistic career as part of the School of Art’s Visiting Artists and Scholars Endowment (VASE) series. She will discuss how she uses both photographic materials as well as hand-crafted textiles to articulate her thoughts about seeing, being and race.

About Myra Greene

Greene is a professor at Atlanta’s Spelman College, where she is chair of the Department of Art & Visual Culture and director of the photography program. Through her last bodies of artistic work, she utilizes the media of photography and fiber to explore representations of race and the body. At the center of her practice is a consideration of how our understanding of color is completely dependent on context — materially, culturally and historically.

Her recent exhibitions, including Spectrum at the Kentucky Museum of Arts and Crafts, continue these interests, interweaving three different bodies of work that present a diverse yet unified consideration of our relationship to and interpretation of color, race and identity.

Greene was born in New York City and received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico. Named the 2021 Georgia State Fellow from South Arts, Greene has seen her work displayed in the permanent collection of The High Museum in Atlanta, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work also has been featured in national exhibitions in galleries and museums that include The New York Public Library, Duke Center for Documentary Studies, Williams College Museum of Art, Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and Sculpture Center in New York City.